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Patrick Metzger, who works at a bank downtown, considers himself an expert at navigating the underground PATH system — he began learning his way around the system of more than 30 kilometres of tunnelled malls that connect more than 70 buildings, as a messenger 30 years ago, and says he is unreasonably proud of his skills.

So what does he tell people down there when they ask him for directions?

“Just go outside. It’s way easier.”

It’s one of those remarkable things about Toronto—the kind of things people in other cities learn about us—that you can travel most of the downtown core without going outside. You can go from the CBC building to Ryerson University to City Hall to the Ferry Docks underground. The trick is not getting lost along the way.

Actually learning the PATH can be like mastering The Knowledge, the famous process London cab drivers need to go through to learn the London street system. There’s no reliable grid of routes, no apparent navigational principles that can help guide you other than simple memorization.

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“The only way to know it is to know it,” Metzger says. The local business association says 78 per cent of those who work in the financial district use the PATH every day, but most of them seem to memorize the one or two specific routes they need to take (from the subway to the office, and over to the nearest food court, for instance). For tourists and Torontonians who, on a cold day, may just try to make an unusual, unfamiliar trip, it can seem hopeless.

Of course, there is a map and way-finding system in place in the PATH, but it is confusing to use. That’s why the Toronto Financial District BIA is in the process of trying to devise a new system that might be more helpful to people. An online survey soliciting ideas and suggestions from the public is open until the end of Feb. 15 (at financialdistrict.com) — and that information will be combined with other studies by consultants Steer Davies Gleave to suggest new maps, signage, and other navigational aids.

It’s worth pausing to acknowledge that the disorienting mazelike nature of the system has grown naturally from what the PATH actually is.

What is today recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest underground shopping complex — and what Financial District BIA executive director Grant Humes says “has turned into probably our busiest pedestrian street in the city” — is just a series of basements of different buildings. It emerged from private landlords agreeing to link together the underground shopping concourses in their various buildings. It was not designed with an eye to people moving across the city through it — it was never intended to be the privately-owned neighbourhood that it has essentially become.

As Humes says, “There is no overriding set of rules. There is no one behind the curtain, quite honestly, thinking about it and pulling the levers on a regular basis.”

Though the city has, since the 1980s, acted as the “co-ordinating agency,” all the sections of the path are owned and controlled, as the city says on its website, “by the owner of the property through which it runs.”

Having twice this week attempted specific journeys through the PATH — from Atrium on Bay to WaterPark Place and from WaterPark Place to City Hall — and having twice gotten lost on the way, I can observe that this understanding of how the PATH evolved and functions is essential to navigating it using existing signage. The “streets” in the underground have no names, and don’t follow the above-ground grid pattern most Torontonians are used to. Instead the signs and maps rely on knowledge of building names or addresses — and the signs present them to you one at a time.

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So, for instance, to get from the Ferry Docks to City Hall, you enter at WaterPark Place, then travel through One York, Air Canada Centre, 25 York, Union Station, Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto-Dominion Centre, First Canadian Place, 121 King West, the Richmond Adelaide Centre, the Sheraton Hotel, and then finally into City Hall (through the parking garage).

If you can keep that list of names, in order, in your head, there’s still some difficulty in finding the signs that direct you to the next destination (especially in Union Station, which remains under significant reconstruction), but you can generally find your way once you do.

Even once you know it, this can be a burdensome process, for obvious reasons — the network has more than 70 buildings in it and more than “60 decision points where a pedestrian has to decide between turning left or right, or continuing straight on,” according to the city. Memorizing sequences between all the various points on the map seems an imposing challenge.

Metzger, whose knowledge depends on recognizing landmarks along the way, suggests perhaps more of those should be put on the maps to aid recognition and navigation (“turn right at the LCBO, go past the pharmacy . . . ”). Ev Delen on Twitter suggested (sensibly, I think), that the major north-south and east-west pathways be given names, so we can navigate in the way we’re accustomed to doing above ground (“take King Street east to Yonge, then go north to Dundas . . . ”). Personally I wonder if the kinds of coloured lines embedded on the ground or walls you see in hospitals (“follow the blue line”) might be useful.

Humes doesn’t want to anticipate the process. He says they are still soliciting public suggestions, and have engaged experts on maps and way-finding and other industries — including “people from the gaming industry,” who might have ideas stemming from the difficulties of players navigating adventure games — to come up with ideas.

What’s clear at this point is something many in Toronto learned long ago, lost and wandering in frustration before heading above ground. As Humes says, “There’s pretty much universal agreement that we can probably do this better.”

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